While the government’s policy on Omicron is being driven by modelling suggesting the possibility of a huge wave of hospitalisations in January, some more real-world data has come in from South Africa.
A presentation by the South African Medical Research Council this morning has offered evidence that while Omicron does indeed appear to be more transmissible than the Delta variant, the trajectory of hospitalisations is flatter.
This would appear to confirm earlier data from hospitals in Gauteng province that Omicron is causing a milder disease than previous variants. Indeed, the graph of the latest outbreak shows a marked decoupling on infection figures for hospitalisation and death figures, compared with earlier waves:
The data indicates that Omicron is 29 per cent less severe than the original Wuhan strain of Covid. However, it also seems to confirm that Omicron is better able to escape the Pfizer vaccine compared with the Delta variant.
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